FROM the EDITORS:

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Your
biography of Pope John Paul II brought the account of his life and
ministry to the threshold of the third Christian millennium. Does your
new book contain evidence that the late Pontiff’s hopes for a New
Evangelization are being fulfilled in the 21st century?

George Weigel: In The End and the Beginning,
I offer a comprehensive analysis of the accomplishments of the
pontificate of John Paul II, including his efforts to define, promote,
and advance the New Evangelization. I think you can see positive results
of those efforts on many fronts: in renewal movements and new Catholic
communities; among seminarians and religious in formation today, and
among younger priests and religious; in a new generation of Catholic
intellectuals; in the vitality of our best parishes, and in the
extraordinary number of people who are baptized or enter into full
communion with the Church every year; in those bishops who have
discovered a “John Paul II voice” and are taking the Church’s proposal
forcefully into the public square. Of course, I’m speaking largely of
the United States here; the New Evangelization hasn’t gotten much
traction yet in “Old Europe.”

In 2002 stories about the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy
received massive media coverage in the United States. Although most of
the incidents were decades old, the scandal raised serious questions
about Church governance. During his long pontificate, could John Paul II
have done more to address the root causes of such clerical abuse?

Weigel: As I hope I showed in Witness to Hope, and as I made a special effort to show in The End and the Beginning,
John Paul II was a great reformer of the priesthood, a point completely
ignored by the mainstream media and largely ignored by the Catholic
media. He was, as Cardinal William Baum once put it, the “greatest
vocations director in history,” and the kind of men he attracted to the
demands of the Catholic priesthood through the power of his own example
are men who will carry out his reform far into the future—and are very,
very unlikely to be abusers of anyone. No one who reads [his
post-synodal apostolic exhortation] Pastores Dabo Vobis or
understands the effect it was already having on American seminaries in
the 1990s can doubt that the reform of the priesthood in the United
States was well underway years before the Long Lent of 2002. That this
was not the case in, say, Ireland, is also true, but the fault there, as
in many other circumstances where clerical corruptions have come to
light, is primarily to be laid to the account of local bishops who were
incompetent, malfeasant, or willfully obtuse.